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Never Let Me Go Characters: The Teachers
Miss Geraldine Miss Geraldine is a gentle and kind young teacher at Hailsham and the children seem to see her as mother figure. She doesn’t really play an active role in the novel but she does indirectly cause certain events. It is in her art class that Tommy draws the childish drawing of an elephant. He says he did it as a joke and gets a laugh from the class. “It might not have led to anything — and this is a big irony, I suppose — if Miss Geraldine hadn’t been taking the class that day” (page 18). “Miss Geraldine was everyone’s favourite guardian when we were that age. She was gentle, soft-spoken, and always comforted you when you needed it, even when you’d done something bad, or been told off by another guardian. If she ever had to tell you off herself, then for days afterwards she’d give you lots of extra attention, like she owed you something” (page 18). “It was unlucky for Tommy that it was Miss Geraldine taking art that day…Had it been teacher Tommy would have got a bit of a telling off, he could have done his smirk, and the worst the other would have thought was that it was a feeble joke…But Miss Geraldine being Miss Geraldine, it didn’t go that way. Instead, she did her best to look at the picture with kindness and understanding. And probably guessing that Tommy was in danger of getting stick from the others, she went too far the other way, actually finding things to praise, pointing them out to the class. That’s how the resentment started” (page 18). Another example of the mother figure Miss Geraldine is to the children is the secret guard a group of girls create to prevent Miss Geraldine from being kidnapped. As usual Ruth is the ringleader and when Kathy confesses she that Miss Geraldine is her favourite guardian Rught invites to be one of the secret guard (page 44 – 45). “We believed Miss Geraldine was the best guardian in Hailsham, and we worked on presents to give her — a large sheet of pressed flowers glued over it comes to mind” (page 45). Ruth uses the secret guard to control the others in the group. “She’d known about the plot for much lonber than the rest of us, and this gave her enormous authority; by hinting that the real evidence came from a time before people like me had joined — that there were things she’d yet to reveal even to us — she could justify almost any decision she made on behalf of the group” (page 50). Another instance is when Ruth presents a pretty pencil case and claimed it came from Miss Geraldine. “There was a certain smile, a certain voice Ruth would use…whenever she wanted to hint about some little favour Miss Geraldine had shown her” (page 52). This irritates Kathy no end and she’s determine not to let Ruth get away with it. But when she finally confronts her with the evidence she’s shocked by the situation. “And suddenly my behaviour seemed to me utterly baffling. All this effort, all this planning, just to upset my dearest friend. So what if she’d fibbed a little about her pencil case? Didn’t we all dream from time to time about one guardian or other bending the rules and doing something special for us? A spontaneous hug, a secret letter, a gift? All Ruth had done was to take one of these harmless daydreams a step further” (page 55). Miss Emily “Miss Emily, our head guardian, was older than the others. She wasn’t especially tall, but something about the way she carried herself, always very straight with her head right up, made you think she was. She wore her silvery hair tied back, but strands were always coming loose and floating about her. They would have driven me mad, but Miss Emily always ignored them, like they were beneath her contempt. By the evening, she was a pretty strange sight, with bits of loose hair everywhere which she wouldn’t bother to push away off her face when she talked to you in her quiet, deliberate voice. We were all pretty scared of her and didn’t think of her in the way we did the other guardians. But we considered her to be fair and respected her decisions; and even in the Juniors, we probably recognised it was her presence, intimidating though it was, that made us all feel so safe at Hailsham” (page 36). When Miss Emily was dissatisfied with the students’ conduct she would talk to them during assembly and it would go on for maybe 20 or 30 minutes. “She’d rarely raise her voice, but there was something steely about her on these occasions and none of us…dared make a sound” (page 39). The students don’t really know what’s going on but “there was a real sense of feeling bad that we had, in some collective way, let down Miss Emily, but try as we might, we couldn’t really follow these lectures…Her general drift was clear enough: we were all very special, being Hailsham students, and so it was all the more disappointing when we behaved badly. Beyond that thought, things became a fog” (page 39). This way of speaking to the students is what Miss Lucy later calls “being told and not told.” Later when Kathy and Tommy go to find Madame to see if they can get a referral, they meet Miss Emily at the same house. She is now in a wheelchair because she’s been ill and she doesn’t have much time to talk to them because she is selling a cabinet and insists on going with it to see it is handled with care. It is Miss Emily that finally reveals all to Tommy and Kathy. Madame Madame is not a teacher but she plays a significant role in the events that happen at Hailsham and has a huge impact on the lives of the main characters and most of the other students. She regularly visits the school to look at the students’ artwork and then takes the best work for her gallery. “The gallery…was something we’d all of us grown up. Everyone talked about it as though it existed, though in truth none of us knew for sure that it did. I’m sure I was pretty typical in not being able to remember how or when I’d first heard about it. Certainly, it hadn’t been from the guardians: they never mention the Gallery, and there was an unspoken rule that we should never even raise the subject in their presence. I’d suppose now it was something passed down through the different generations of Hailsham students…But did we really believe in the Gallery? Today I’m not so sure…If for us the Gallery remained a hazy realm, what was solid enough fact was Madame’s turning up usually twice — sometimes three of four times — each year to select out best work. We called her ‘Madame’ because she was French or Belgian…and that was what the guardians always called her. She was a tall, narrow woman with short hair, probably quite young still…She always wore a sharp grey suit, and unlike the guardians, unlike the drivers who brought in our supplies…she wouldn’t talk to us and kept us at a distance with her chilly look” (page 28 – 30). One night Ruth comes up with a theory that Madame isn’t snooty or aloof, she’s afraid of them. They decide to put the theory to the test: “the six of us in on it would like in wait for Madame somewhere, then ‘swarm out’ all around her, all at once. We’d all remain perfectly civilised and just go on our way, but if we timed it right, and she was taken off-guard, we’d see…that she was really afraid of us” (page 31). But after they walk past her a ”strange change” comes over them. ”Until then, it had been a pretty light-hearted matter, with a bit of a dare element to it. And it wasn’t as though Madame did anything other than what we predicted she’d do: she just froze and waited for us to pass by. She didn’t shriek, or even let out a gasp. But we were so keenly tuned it to picking up her response, and that’s probably why it had such an effect on us…And I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her…we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders” (page 32). “After that day, mention of Madame became, while not taboo exactly, pretty rare among us. And this was something that soon spread beyond our little group to just about all the students in our year. We were, I’d say, as curious as ever about her, but we all sensed that to probe any further — about what she did with our work, whether there was really a gallery — would get us into territory we weren’t ready for yet” (page 34). The idea of Madame’s gallery again plays a large role in the plot later on when the idea of couples getting deferrals comes up. Madame is also the one who sees Kathy listening to her tape and when she later talks to her at Miss Emily’s house we see that Madame did have compassion and sympathy for the clones, despite her reactions. Miss Lucy Miss Lucy is a young guardian who has a big impact on Tommy’s life. She “was the most sporting of the guardians at Hailsham, though you might not have guessed it from her appearance. She had a squat, almost bulldoggy figure, and her odd black hair, when it grew, grew upwards so it never covered her ears of chunky neck. But she was really strong and fit, and even when we were older, most of us — even the boys — couldn’t keep up with her on a fields run. She was superb at hockey, and could even hold her own with the Senior boys on the football pitch…When we’d been in the Juniors, she’d never been someone like Miss Geraldine who you turned to when you were upset. In fact, she didn’t tend to speak much to us when we were younger. It was only in the Seniors, really, we’d started to appreciate her brisk style” (page 24). When Tommy is being teased by the other students for not being creative, Miss Lucy tells him that he shouldn’t worry and be bothered by what other people say. This comes to light when Kathy starts to notice that Tommy is beginning to control his temper and doesn’t have tantrums when provoked by the other children. Kathy asks him about it he says that Miss Lucy had a talk with him and told him that ”if I didn’t want to be creative, if I really didn’t feel like it, that was perfectly all right. Nothing wrong with that, she said” (page 22). “When she’d first asked him to come to her study after Art Appreciation, Tommy explained, he’d expected yet another lecture about how he should try harder…But as they were walking from the house towards the Orangery — where the guardians had their living quarters — Tommy began to get an inkling this was something different. Then, once he was seated in Miss Lucy’s easy chair…she asked him to tell her the whole story…of what had been happening to him. So Tommy had begun going through it all. But before he was even half way she’d suddenly broken in and started to talk to herself. She’d known a lot of students, she’d said, who’d for a long time found it very difficult to be creative…Then one day they’d turned a corner and blossomed. It was quite possible Tommy was one of those…She was soon saying things Tommy found very difficult to follow. But she kept repeating it until eventually he began to understand. If Tommy genuinely tried, she was saying, but he just couldn’t be very creative, then that was quite all right, he wasn’t to worry about it. It was wrong for anyone, whether they were students or guardians, to punish him for it, or put pressure on him in any way. It simply wasn’t his fault. And when Tommy had protested it was all very well Miss Lucy saying this, but everyone did think it was his fault, she’d given a sigh and looked out of her window. Then she’d said: ‘It may not help you much. But just you remember this. There’s at least one person here at Hailsham who believes otherwise. At least one person who believes you’re a very good student, as good as any she’s ever come across, never mind how creative you are’” (page 25). Tommy also tells Kathy that Miss Lucy was shaking with rage, but “not at me anyway, that was the most important thing!…I don’t know who she was angry with. But she was angry all right” (page 26). Miss Lucy also confuses Tommy because ”she said we weren’t being taught enough…What she was talking about was, you know, about us. What’s going to happen to us one day. Donations and all that” (page 27). After the conversation with Tommy about Miss Lucy, Kathy starts to look at her in a different light. “I now saw her as the most likely source of important clues. And that’s how it was, over the next year or two, I came to notice various odd little things she said or did that my friends missed altogether” (page 70). For example one day Miss Lucy was teaching them English. “We’d been looking at some poetry, but had somehow drifted onto talking about soldiers in World War Two being kept in prison camps. One of the boys asked if the fences aroung the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching the fence. This might have been intended as a serious point, but the rest of us thought it was pretty funny. We were all laughing and talking at once…I went on watching Miss Lucy throught all this and I could see, just for a second, a ghostly expression come over her face as she watched the class in front of her. Then — I kept watching carefully — she pulled herself together, smiled and said: ‘It’s just as well the fences at Hailsham aren’t electrified. You get terrible accidents sometimes. “She said this quite softly, and because people were still shouting, she was more or less drowned out. But I heard her clearly enough. ‘You get terrible accidents sometimes.’ What accidents? Where? But no one picked her up on it, and we went to discussing out poem. “There were other little incidents like that, and before long I came to see Miss Lucy as being not quite like the other guardians. It’s even possible I began to realise, right back then, the nature of her worries and frustrations” (page 71). One day during their last year at Hailsham it starts to rain when they want to play rounders. A group of 30 wait for the rain to stop in the pavilion with Miss Lucy. Suddenly she stops a conversation she overhears between two boys. ”All right, you can hear this, it’s for all of you. It’s time someone spelt it out” (page 72). She asks the boy to repeat what he said. “Peter shrugged. ‘We were just talking about what it would be feel like if we became actors. What sort of life it would be.’ ‘Yes,’ Miss Lucy said, ‘and you were saying to Gordon you’d have to go to America to stand the best chance.’ Peter J shrugged again and muttered quietly: ‘Yes, Miss Lucy.’ But Miss Lucy was now moving her gaze over the lot of us. ‘I know you don’t mean any harm. But there’s just too much talk like this. I hear it all the time, it’s been allowed to go on, and it’s not right…If no one else will talk to you…then I will. The problem, as I see it, is that you’ve been told and not told. You’ve been told, but none of you really understand, and I dare say, some people are quite happy to leave it that way. But I’m not. If you’re going to have decent lives, then you’ve got to know and know properly. None of you will go to America, none of you will be film stars. And none of you will be working in supermarkets as I heard some of you planning the other day. Your lives are set out for you. You’ll become adults, then before you’re old, before you’re even middle-aged, you’ll start to donate you vital organs. That’s what each of you was created to do. You’re not like the actors you watch on your videos, you’re not even like me. You were brought into this world for a purpose, and your futures, all of them, have been decided. So you’re not to talk that way any more. You’ll be leaving Hailsham before long, and it’s not so far off, the day you’ll be preparing for your first donations. You need to remember that. If you’re to have decent lives, you have to know who you are and what lies ahead of you, every one of you” (page 73 – 74). Most of the students don’t understand what Miss Lucy is going on about, but Kathy does. Tommy later comes up with a theory ”of Miss Lucy’s ’told and not told’ idea” (page 74). “Tommy thought it possible the guardians had, throughout all our years at Hailsham, timed very carefully and deliberately everything they told us, so that we were always just too young to understand properly the latest piece of information. But of course we’d take it in at some level, so that before long all this stuff was there in our heads without us ever having examined it properly. It’s a bit too mush like a conspiracy theory to me — I don’t think our guardians were that crafty — but there’s probably something in it. Certainly, it feels like I always knew about donations in some vague way, even as early as six or seven. And it’s curious, when we were older and the guardians were giving us those talks, nothing came as a complete surprise. It was like we’d heard everything somewhere before” (page 75). After a while Tommy starts to get angrily easily again and Kathy thinks it’s because he and Ruth have broken up. But when she goes to talk to him about it he says he’s had another conversation with Miss Lucy. Tommy had helped her to carry flipcharts and files to the Orangery. “Then when we were coming up to Orangery, she suddenly stopped, and I thought she’d dropped something else. But she was looking at me, like this, straight in the face, all serious. Then she says we’ve got to have a talk, a good talk. I say fine, and so we go into the Orangery, into her study, put all the stuff down. And she tells me to sit down, and I end up exactly where I was the last time…she just starts off saying something like: ‘Tommy, I made a mistake, when I said what I did to you. And I should have put you right about it long before now.’ Then she’s saying I should forget everything she told me before. That she’d done me a big disservice telling me not to worry about being creative. That the other guardians had been right all along, and there was no excuse for my art being rubbish…She said she was sorry she’d told me what she had the last time because if she hadn’t, I might have sorted it all by now…I didn’t know what to say. In the end, she actually asked. She said: ‘Tommy, what are you thinking?’ So I said I wasn’t sure but that she shouldn’t worry either way because I was all right now. And she said, no, I wasn’t all right. My art was rubbish, and that was partly her fault for telling me what she had…she keeps shaking her head, saying: ‘It does matter. I shouldn’t have said what I did.’ So it occurs to me she’s talking about later, you know, about after we leave here. So I say: ‘But I’ll be all right, Miss. I’m really fit, I know how to look after myself. When it’s time for donations, I ‘ll be able to do it really well.’…Then she says: ‘Listen, Tommy, your art, it is important. And not just because it’s evidence. But for your own sake. You’ll get a lot from it, just for yourself.’…She said our art was important, and ‘not just because it’s evidence.’ God knows what she meant. I did actually ask her, when she said that. I said I didn’t understand what she was telling me, and was it something to do with Madame and her gallery? And she did a big sigh and said: ‘Madame’s gallery, yes, that’s important. Much more important that I once thought….Look, there are all kinds of things you don’t understand, Tommy, and I can’t tell you about them. Things about Hailsham, about your place in the wider world, all kinds of things. But perhaps one day, you’ll try and find out. They won’t make it easy for you, but if you want to, really want to, you might find out…But why should you be any different? The students who leave here, they never find out much. Why should you be any different?’” (page 98 – 100). Soon afterwards they learn that Miss Lucy has left Hailsham. Of course Tommy, Kathy and Ruth do find out a lot about their situation in the end and a lot of clues and encouragement came from Miss Lucy, although neither Tommy nor Kathy really knew it at the time.